Enmity and Meanings Thereof
by Zero Slash One
Summary: In which Keaton gets some news he had not expected. In which Samus gets a new perspective on the Pirates she fights. In which Ridley gets to wax poetic. OR: This author being self-indulgent with ships that should -never- happen.


The report that disclosed Samus Aran had joined Ridley had been unanticipated to the Chairman, mildly put. It made virtually no sense for her to do anything of the sort, especially in light of Ridley's actions towards the family, and so Keaton dismissed it.

That was an assessment he revised when other news began to come in. A raid on a city on Aelos Ten, an attack on a supply ship crossing through the upper-north quadrant, a sighting on a Space Pirate world on the other end of the galaxy from an officer there. Samus Aran had gotten quite far in these four months, that much was clear.

A gathering was quickly convened, and to his frustration not achieving much other than tossing ideas about.

Chairman Traker of the science department suggested that she had genuinely defected, a speculation that nobody present agreed with the eternal pessimist about. The chairman of the funerary and medicinal services had voiced the suggestion that she was infiltrating them to bring them low from within. The alternative suggestions had come that she was under some form of brainwashing, or perhaps even that Ridley had grown obsessed with her enough that he had made a clone more amenable to working with him.

In all, they had reached no conclusion nor dismissed any suggestion. Even Traker's had not been rejected - though nobody among them much believed that Samus Aran would willingly join the murderer of her parents, the evidence they had available didn't disprove that theory.

As time went on, Keaton got more and more news about Samus's exploits.

Space Pirate engineers had built a base out on Bion, and a construction plant for warships, under her command. On Solairon 5, her soldiers had taken over several dozen cities with appalling swiftness, and made a base on the planet's desert continent, then begun mining the planet. At various galactic regions, she had been sighted in battles - some times alongside Ridley, most commonly with a swarm of Pirates at her beck and call - for artifacts, weapons, and raw materials to construct more.

The first few reports drew a curious pattern - her travels were remarkably fast, even for peak-capacity FTL. Keaton decided this potential evidence for Torloso's clone theory, and that Ridley had actually had several Samuses produced. His question was, where was the original Samus Aran in that scenario? Was she dead, or alive and imprisoned somewhere to serve as a biomass-donor?

The next series of reports concerning her were more of the same - stories about 'Samus', if indeed she was the bounty hunter, being savage and destructive. The third one was most alarming, for involving the deaths of three Federal Police officers out up-west. One of them both sickened and intrigued Keaton.

Supposedly, she had brought the family of one officer into matters, to have them be an audience to the man being tortured until he could no longer whimper or weep, then tortured the wife while he and their kid saw it so they could know how powerless they were, then switched to the child when the mother had ceased to amuse her, so father and daughter could watch that, and just continued changing victim until...

Keaton hadn't wanted to read much further than that, morbidly fascinating though it was. That same night, he'd been kept awake by the knowledge of what had happened with the girl.

The next morning, he called for a meeting with all eight heads of the police divisions - even the glutton, despite his feelings concerning the human. Only three had been available, Hardy and Nemo and Qw'eart, and within range to travel to the planet. Hardy in particular had been too outraged by Samus' defection and crimes to really contribute, and had elected to step outside.

By the end, they hadn't worked any radical plan out for handling her actions, just decided to bolster their forces and defenses against Samus as well as all other threats from Space Pirates and rogue elements, and have all supply ships travel in packs of at least whenever possible.

The reports of the third week were unremarkable, not least because there weren't as many of her activities to document. She had been sighted in the lower-west quadrant's outskirts, having boarded a six-thrusters cuboid ship in departing the planet, and not heard from for the rest of the month.

It was after almost two weeks of inactivity that a new report got on Keaton's screen - surprisingly, not one concerning a Space Pirate invasion of some planet or a raided supply ship. A captured officer had been rescued from a prison-camp, the sole survivor of her squad, and drawn a rather disturbing picture of Samus to Commander Nemo.

From what Keaton had read that morning, she and Ridley had gotten into the habit of torturing people for fun, a vicious cycle where one encouraged the other to be imaginatively sadistic with sweet nothings and their appreciation. Noata and both of the woman's fellow officers had been their victims, and the Volt Driver device her instrument in assessing how much their respective physiologies could endure.

That she had survived was questionable luck sooner than any act of mercy, that much the report had made clear to the congressman by the time he finished it. He'd been left with a unpleasant mental image as well. She had been particularly evocative in relating how it looked to see her Simian comrade have great chunks of his musculature burned away, not a sight he was eager to again see.

The update had served to cement one thing in Keaton's mind. Whoever this woman was - a clone with artificial memories, a shapeshifter, another X Parasite impersonating Samus, something else - she was not Samus Aran, whatever she claimed. Of that, he had been sure.

* * *

 _"If I had only known how fun this was years ago,"_ Samus lamented, in the middle of a sit-up.

She'd heard them say so, Space Pirates and criminals and others, but never really believed them. An excuse, a way to fill a void, that was what she had thought it was, thought Samus, resting for a moment before leaning back down.

It was thrilling, liberating, to be able to fight for no greater reason than to test herself. It was relief beyond words to have nobody else to lose, no more emotional attachments to people, save one.

Her expression soured, and she sat up again, savoring the strain. _"Someday, I am going to kill the bastard,"_ someday, when he had exhausted his every possible use to her.

It was rewarding too, even more than she had dared to dream. Raids earned more than the vast majority of her collected bounties. The lucrative income made up for the look on Adam's face.

Exhaling a sigh, she leaned back down, a slight smirk forming on her face.

It was great fun to mess with the galaxy like this, people like Adam and Keaton who would have sworn that this could never have happened. _"If they knew everything..."_ Samus speculated what they would say, then.

Dismissing that thought, she inhaled, and sat up again. From his corner of the exercise hall, Ridley watched her repetitions with detached interest.

 _"Twenty years or thereabouts,"_ noted the purple dragon. Almost two whole decades, and there still seemed more to the one called Samus Aran than he knew about.

As a child, she had shown him inklings of her bravery and compassion, extending her friendship where he expected that no other in this galaxy would. As an adult, she had proven herself a warrior formidable almost beyond compare, fighting him better than almost anyone had in his two-hundred years of life.

Now, he had come to find her a good drinking buddy as well. Damnation, this woman was the whole package. Having enemies was a fact of life in his work, and they didn't come much finer than Samus. He would be proud to tell anyone that he hated and loved nobody else like her.

Well, no, decided Ridley. It would only hurt his reputation to let anyone else know that he felt things other than rage and bloodlust, and the average citizen of the galaxy thought that enemies shared only hatred anyway.

The sound of blunt foot-steps interrupted them both in their musings. They turned, looking towards the far-side exit.

"Lieges," the Pirate's mandibles moved as he spoke, "we've just received a transmission from the northern base. They want to demonstrate a new gauntlet-weapon system they've developed."

Samus took a moment to think. "Tell them I'll be over sometime tomorrow."

The grunt made to leave, and Samus resumed the exercise, and Ridley continued to watch her.


End file.
